Advise on dealing with uni coursework?

[Mum2dd19]

I am currently doing a BMS course and I am really struggling to just complete a assignment . It is eating up so much of my time, and I tend to spend so long trying to guess what I meant to do rather than just getting on with it meaning I am falling behind on revision or other tasks .
Obviously I am a direct entry student so getting to grips with alot of what is available firstly is difficult enough.

However, i am finding we do a experiment or lab session than given say a lab report to do .
There nothing that states as such what I am meant to do with the results ,than it briefly says one or two points like use the software to do this or that and that about it .
I am a mature student who doesn't live on campus however, I feel and I hear other students are also struggling with work but than they have each other to sort help fill in the gaps.

If I was to ask other I just feel like they don't seem to even know anymore than I do . Or it could be a case of so they say they don't.
I would approach the lecturer but I don't even know where to start with what to ask ,as I just don't know overall what I am trying to achieve here.
When I last studied although the assignments were difficult at that point , I was given a clear brief of what is expected who my audience was or some kind of background scenario.

I’d speak to your lecturer and say something similar to what you have here. It sounds a perfectly reasonable to me for you to ask for a bit more help or guidance, the lecturers don’t want you to fail, they’re there to help as well as teach.

Is BMS Biomedical Sciences? Have you got any guidelines, exemplar reports, marking guidelines etc? If not, maybe you could look at scientific papers? The structure will be similar.

When you do experiments/lab sessions, is it a specific experiment or do you collect data and are expected to collect data and use that to come up with a hypothesis?

Eg Are you told you are doing an investigation into how the red blood cell parameters vary between males and females or would you go into class, take blood samples, do various tests, record other data, such as sex, age, ethnicity and be left to come up with a title, hypothesis etc yourself?

The structure would be something along the lines of:

A title (be accurate, if you were looking at differences in red blood cell parameters in males and females but all your data comes from healthy 20 somethings you might want to specify that).

An abstract/introduction/aims & hypothesis type section where you give a brief background to the subject area with references, what the aim of the experiment is, the type of study it is (there are different kinds of experimental design eg double blind trial), give a justified hypothesis etc

A method: equipment used, procedure, details of how you will analyse the data etc

Results: present the raw data in the best way to visualise what you are trying to show eg tables, graphs, pie charts etc Then describe trends, analyse the data statistically to see if it is significant. I'm guessing you have been taught how to choose the correct statistical tests to perform or you are told which ones to use if you haven't learnt that yet? There are plenty of online guides on which tests to use for different types of data.

Discussion & Conclusion: summarise the main findings. Then align the discussion to your aims/hypothesis, refer to other research that supports/contradicts your findings, discuss issues that might have affected your results eg if you were looking blood pressure, stress caused by taking the test could have caused anomalies in some subjects, then give a conclusion that is supported by your results eg in the example of red blood cell parameters, RBC is lower in females than males.